[G4] Rember 0.2.2b a OSX App to test Memory

[CJ Scaminaci]

Hello Dick,

I'm Tony's (the Mac OS X developer of Memtest) son. I aid him in 
development of Memtest and  also run the MemtestOSX website. 
(http://memtestosx.org), I saw this and thought I should throw in a few 
comments.

We don't recommend its use if you're someone who knows how to run 
command line apps. Rember's GUI and communication techniques to the 
Memtest process are less than desirable. They eat a lot of CPU and 
memory in and of themselves, leaving less for Memtest to test itself.
Also when I took a look at the Rember source code, a lot of it appeared 
to be chopped out of Apple samples, and contained a lot of OS 9 code 
that was just mucking things up.

Memory testers aren't good programs to run graphically. Because of the 
complexity of RAM, it's hard to explain here, but you'll find you might 
get MUCH different results if you run Memtest in single user mode, a-la 
documentation suggestion. http://memtestosx.org has documentation and 
the command line version available for download.

Also nothing that there's a bug in the version of Memtest currently 
incorporated into Rember, that makes it say All tests passed, even when 
they don't. I'm pretty sure he hasn't fixed this, because this print 
out shows an old version number. 4.04M (Rev 2) Command Line fixed the 
bug, but I don't think he saw this.

> MacOS X (Darwin) running in multi-user mode
> POSIX version 198808
> Pagesize is 4096
> Pagesizemask is 0xfffffffffffff000
> Requested memory: 1MB (1048576 bytes)
> Available memory: 647MB (679149568 bytes)
> Allocated memory: 1MB (1048576 bytes)
> Attempting to lock allocated physical memory....memory locked 
> successfully

Why did you only test 1MB? Was it only for the purpose of this 
demonstration? Also note that you can input above the amount of memory 
that is actually free. This is actually a good practice because it 
forces Memtest to scale back and grab inactive memory, thus allowing 
you to test more.

But long email short, take it from the Mac OSX developer. We recommend 
that you download and run Memtest in Single User mode like the 
documentation states. Rember is an OK alternative for most users, but 
it has many flaws that can cause it to return skewed information.

-CJ Scaminaci
http://memtestosx.org